The Deeper Dive: When Is It Time To Junk Your Car?

About a third of the questions I get from readers center around one issue: euthanasia in the car world, or what I like to call "automotive decrapitation".

In other words, when is it the right time to recycle an old car and transform it into a cheap Chinese washer and dryer?

The logical answer I give these folks is shockingly simple. You should get rid of a car when it's worth more dead than alive.

When a car costs more to repair than replace with another one just like it in better condition, it's time to put it on Craigslist and pray for a real customer – one that hopefully isn't some hideous combination of scam and spam.

Once I tell a non-enthusiast this, the conversation too often changes direction and they usually blurt out something along the lines of, "Oh! Well…let me tell you about this problem that my mechanic can't figure out," as if I have some paranormal E.T.-like power to figure out which of the 10,000+ parts of a given car are going wonky at a given moment. After a few minutes of whistling old Bruce Springsteen tunes inside my head, I start to feel like Tony Soprano when one of his drugged up underlings starts spouting off on how he should run his business.

"Look. I do this for a living and let me tell you, your car is not special. Really. Toyota produced over 400,000 of them that year and they were all boring as hell. Go get a Miata and live a little bit!"

Of course, I only say this to the people who can withstand a Jersey verbal barrage without going psycho, which in Georgia means absolutely nobody at all. So my response is usually a tame version of this.

"Oh. Um… well…. let me ask you, why do you want to keep the son-of-a-bitch?"

Weddings. Family life. The trouble-free miles of times past. Nobody really mentions those things. Most folks don't want to keep a car because they loved it not too long ago.

Instead it's usually because they're either too financially strapped, too cheap to 'invest' in the maintenance the car needs, or too bored with their present life not to turn a simple decision about a crappy car into a rolling rendition of Hamlet.

The car buying public is not logical. If they were, you wouldn't see the common citizen finance over $30,000 on a new car that makes the daily commute only 6 percent less miserable than the old car. You also wouldn't see a MINI with an automatic.

So let me offer the five best answers to the question, "When is it the right time to get rid of your car?"

1. When you can no longer refer to it as a "shitbox" in a loving manner.
2. When you decide to become an owner that deserves the last name Kevorkian.
3. When you visit the repair shop so often that you start up old conversations with the owner right where they left off.
4. When any interest in your car immediately conjures up the words, "Please! God! Thank you!";
   and finally,
5. When you have enough resources to pay cash, and some foolish entity is willing to heavily subsidize your purchase with cash back, rebates, incentives, tax credits, and 0% financing. Then you tell a friend or family member about the car, and they sell you their old one at a steal of a price.

Feel free to share any advice, especially bad pearls of wisdom you have come across in your travels. In my experiences, most old beaters deserve better than their owners, but some broken down claptraps truly need to have their old Kia recycled into a higher quality Kenmore. Feel free to share those as well.

The post The Deeper Dive: When Is It Time To Junk Your Car? appeared first on The Truth About Cars.

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